God of War director Cory Barlog: I learned so much from Kojima’s games

Game director Cory Barlog just released his latest game, God of War, to universal acclaim. The PlayStation 4 title has sold over 3 million units in its first three days on the market and is still topping the charts after three weeks. On Twitter, user French Stranding asked him if he has taken any inspiration from Kojima’s games over the years. Cory responded: “I learned so much from Kojima’s games. I remember losing so much sleep binging on MGS2. I was so tired at one point that when the codex conversations started breaking the 4th wall, I literally thought they were talking directly to me. Freaked me out. Master fucking class.”

Chiming in on the conversation, Twitter user Dave Maverick praised how both Metal Gear Solid 2 and God of War do a good job on raising the question of what we want to transmit to our children and future generations. Cory responded: “Thank you, Dave. That was on my mind a lot during the production of this game. Nice to hear that is resonated with people.”

God of War makes use of a single shot (without any cuts) to tell its story. This is something Kojima experimented with as well with MGSV. However, according to Cory his idea of using this technique wasn’t inspired by MGSV, but rather something he wanted to do for several years. “MGSV and Hellblade had single shot camera elements in them. It seems we were all working on the similar idea at the same time. But the idea for the single shot was something I was thinking about and pitching for a few years before I came back to Sony.”